These days The Making of the President 1972 is of course damned, because Theodore White comes too close to accepting President Nixon's view of himself…. Hunter Thompson …, with his [Fear and Loathing: on the Campaign Trail '72] has aroused even more partisan comment: if you hate President Nixon and the American establishment generally, Thompson is good; if not, he's unbelievably bad. (p. 7)

It is true that [Thompson] claims to "record the reality of an incredibly volatile presidential campaign while it was happening" …, but his reality is openly—one might say deliberately—biased. "Combining aggressive ignorance with a natural instinct to mock the conventional wisdom," he would give us a "high-speed cinematic reel-record of what the campaign was like at the time, not what the whole thing boiled down to or how it fits into history."…